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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • For streaming services like Spotifiy, whitenoise does not use more bandwidth than any other podcasts, songs etc.

    This is because they are usually using lossy compression which will compress the audio with a specified average bitrate, so e.g. 160 kbits. This means the final audio stream is about the same size no matter what content you’re listing to. This would only matter for streaming sites like Tidal that use lossless compression to deliver a identical bit stream. And even then, the best lossless compression algorithms only safe about half the bitrate, so worst case the audio stream would be twice the size.

    Also with modern lossy audio compression algorithms like opus, people will struggle to hear any difference with most kind of audio (including white noise), even in A/B tests. With lossless compression you don’t have a identical bit stream to the source material, but with high enough bitrates it is good enough that people won’t hear a difference.

    I agree though that a white noise generator in the app would be a nice feature to save some bandwidth.